Auctioning versus grandfathering in cap-and-trade systems with market power and incomplete information

We compare auctioning and grandfathering as allocation mechanisms of emission permits when there is a secondary market with market power and firms have private information on their own abatement technologies. Based on real-life cases such as the EU ETS, we consider a multi-unit, multi-bid uniform auction. At the auction, each firm anticipates its role in the secondary market, either as a leader or a follower. This role affects each firms’ valuation of the permits (which are not common across firms) as well as their bidding strategies and it precludes the auction from generating a cost-effective allocation of permits, as it occurs in simpler auction models. Auctioning tends to be more cost-effective than grandfathering when the firms’ abatement cost functions are sufficiently different from one another, especially if the follower has lower abatement costs than the leader and the dispersion of the marginal costs is large enough.

Spatial and Functional Organization of Pig Trade in Different European Production Systems: Implications for Disease Prevention and Control

Understanding the complexity of live pig trade organization is a key factor to predict and control major infectious diseases, such as classical swine fever (CSF) or African swine fever (ASF). Whereas the organization of pig trade has been described in several European countries with indoor commercial production systems, little information is available on this organization in other systems, such as outdoor or small-scale systems. The objective of this study was to describe and compare the spatial and functional organization of live pig trade in different European countries and different production systems. Data on premise characteristics and pig movements between premises were collected during 2011 from Bulgaria, France, Italy, and Spain, which swine industry is representative of most of the production systems in Europe (i.e., commercial vs. small-scale and outdoor vs. indoor). Trade communities were identified in each country using the Walktrap algorithm. Several descriptive and network metrics were generated at country and community levels. Pig trade organization showed heterogeneous spatial and functional organization. Trade communities mostly composed of indoor commercial premises were identified in western France, northern Italy, northern Spain, and north-western Bulgaria. They covered large distances, overlapped in space, demonstrated both scale-free and small-world properties, with a role of trade operators and multipliers as key premises. Trade communities involving outdoor commercial premises were identified in western Spain, south-western and central France. They were more spatially clustered, demonstrated scale-free properties, with multipliers as key premises. Small-scale communities involved the majority of premises in Bulgaria and in central and Southern Italy. They were spatially clustered and had scale-free properties, with key premises usually being commercial production premises. These results indicate that a disease might spread very differently according to the production system and that key premises could be targeted to more cost-effectively control diseases. This study provides useful epidemiological information and parameters that could be used to design risk-based surveillance strategies or to more accurately model the risk of introduction or spread of devastating swine diseases, such as ASF, CSF, or foot-and-mouth disease.

bioNMF: a versatile tool for non-negative matrix factorization in biology

Medical imaging has become an absolutely essential diagnostic tool for clinical practices; at present, pathologies can be detected with an earliness never before known. Its use has not only been relegated to the field of radiology but also, increasingly, to computer-based imaging processes prior to surgery. Motion analysis, in particular, plays an important role in analyzing activities or behaviors of live objects in medicine. This short paper presents several low-cost hardware implementation approaches for the new generation of tablets and/or smartphones for estimating motion compensation and segmentation in medical images. These systems have been optimized for breast cancer diagnosis using magnetic resonance imaging technology with several advantages over traditional X-ray mammography, for example, obtaining patient information during a short period. This paper also addresses the challenge of offering a medical tool that runs on widespread portable devices, both on tablets and/or smartphones to aid in patient diagnostics.

RADIANCE-A planning software for intra-operative radiation therapy

In the last decades accumulated clinical evidence has proven that intra-operative radiation therapy (IORT) is a very valuable technique. In spite of that, planning technology has not evolved since its conception, being outdated in comparison to current state of the art in other radiotherapy techniques and therefore slowing down the adoption of IORT. RADIANCE is an IORT planning system, CE and FDA certified, developed by a consortium of companies, hospitals and universities to overcome such technological backwardness. RADIANCE provides all basic radiotherapy planning tools which are specifically adapted to IORT. These include, but are not limited to image visualization, contouring, dose calculation algorithms-Pencil Beam (PB) and Monte Carlo (MC), DVH calculation and reporting. Other new tools, such as surgical simulation tools have been developed to deal with specific conditions of the technique. Planning with preoperative images (preplanning) has been evaluated and the validity of the system being proven in terms of documentation, treatment preparation, learning as well as improvement of surgeons/radiation oncologists (ROs) communication process. Preliminary studies on Navigation systems envisage benefits on how the specialist to accurately/safely apply the pre-plan into the treatment, updating the plan as needed. Improvements on the usability of this kind of systems and workflow are needed to make them more practical. Preliminary studies on Intraoperative imaging could provide an improved anatomy for the dose computation, comparing it with the previous pre-plan, although not all devices in the market provide good characteristics to do so. DICOM.RT standard, for radiotherapy information exchange, has been updated to cover IORT particularities and enabling the possibility of dose summation with external radiotherapy. The effect of this planning technology on the global risk of the IORT technique has been assessed and documented as part of a failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA). Having these technological innovations and their clinical evaluation (including risk analysis) we consider that RADIANCE is a very valuable tool to the specialist covering the demands from professional societies (AAPM, ICRU, EURATOM) for current radiotherapy procedures.